The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 & 2008)

A flying saucer lands on a baseball field in Washington. A man walks down the ramp holding a gift, says he has come in peace with goodwill, and a nervous soldier shoots him inside a minute. Seventy-five years later we are still working through what that scene set up.

The Day the Earth Stood Still arrives in September 1951, five months after The Thing from Another World, and does the opposite of everything else in the flying saucer boom. Robert Wise's alien is not a menace to be burned. He is polite, patient, 78 years old in a 35 year old body, and he has brought a present for the president. Behind him stands Gort, seven foot seven of Lock Martin in a rubber suit, capable of dissolving a tank in seconds and, for reasons nobody has ever satisfactorily explained, wearing little pants.

The way it got made is almost better than the film. Fox went hunting for a story about world peace and came back with Harry Bates' Farewell to the Master, a 1940 short story that has nothing to do with world peace. They retitled it, rewrote it, and threw away the twist that gives it its name, the one where the robot turns out to be the master and the man the servant. What survived was a saucer, a shooting and a big robot. What they built on top of that won a special Golden Globe for promoting international understanding.

So the thing we keep circling back to is that this is the film that writes the friendly alien playbook, and what it actually establishes is that friendly comes with terms attached. Klaatu is warm, magnetic, and wins over every single person who bothers to hear him out. He is also holding the planet at gunpoint for the entire runtime. His message is peace or obliteration, and there is no third option. Nearly every benevolent visitor who lands after this one inherits some version of that tension. We come in peace, or else.

Then 2008. Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, glowing green orbs, a swarm of nanobots and a McDonald's. We both went in expecting a disaster and came out thinking it is a genuinely decent attempt at the job. The nuclear threat becomes an environmental one, which has aged into being more relevant rather than less. Klaatu now arrives having already decided we are not worth saving, which is a real change to the premise rather than a fresh coat of CGI. The final act falls apart, but it earns its own existence.

In this episode we get into flying saucer mania and what 1951 audiences carried into the cinema with them, Michael Rennie's charm offensive and the two separate times he gets gunned down, Gort's little pants and the circus strongman connection, the day the American dairy industry stood still, Sam Jaffe and the Red Channels blacklist sitting quietly inside a film about fear of the unknown, who you would take an alien to see today if you had to pick between Brian Cox and Martin Lewis, Klaatu as Jesus in 1951 and Old Testament God in 2008, GORT as an acronym (Genetically Organized Robotic Technology, and no, we do not like it), and whether humanity is worth saving as answered over a meal in a McDonald's.

Mind the soldiers, keep your hands where they can see them, and settle in.

Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Journey Through Sci-Fi is a sci-fi film history podcast hosted by James Payne and Matt Willcock, taking one big science fiction idea through the decades, two films at a time.

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